Paleontological Laboratory at SUNY
Cortland

The Paleontological Laboratory at SUNY Cortland represents a
collection web pages describing the facilities of the paleontology
laboratory as well as a listing of resources for current and
prospective students and information on several paleontological
and professional groups. This website and server are maintained by Christopher McRoberts. For McRoberts' webpage (including links to research and publications), click here.

Site Index:

Listing of pages (and links) associated with the
paleo.cortland.edu server

Paleontologic Student Research at SUNY Cortland

Students with an interest in paleontology have several opportunities to conduct research at SUNY Cortland. Not only is the Cortland area amongst the best regions in the world to collect and study Devonian-aged fossils, but students have had the opportunity to conduct and assist in paleontological research in places such as Austria, Italy, Alaska, British Columbia, and Nevada. Undergraduate students use this experience to develop skills in independent critical thinking, acquire knowledge that transcends classroom study, and as a stepping-stone to further research in graduate school. The results of student paleontological research often involve presentations on campus or at professional meetings, or even published in peer-reviewed journals. Undergraduate student researchers at Cortland can sometimes get funding to conduct their research through aid from faculty research grants, travel grants, or from competitive summer fellowships.

Over the past several years, several undergraduate students have been actively involved in a wide array of paleontological research projects including:

Equipment

The Paleontology laboratory is a modern facility with a variety of
teaching and research equipment. The laboratory is amply equipped
with binocular and petrographic microscopes and several computer workstations. Additionally, the
laboratory is equipped with fossil preparation equipment including mechanical preparation tools (e.g., drills, engravers, pneumatic scribes, and air
abrasive facilities, an acid-proccessing facility with fume
hood and processing area, splitters, seives, and shakers for sediment and grain-size analyses, and
complete digital imaging systems for macro and micropaleontolgical work. Elsewhere in the Department and science building are
thin-sectioning and rock-sawing machines, a Rigaku MiniFlex Powder X-ray diffractometer and a ISI-DS-130C scanning electron microscope that are extensively used in paleontological research.

Collections

Currently the Department of Geology and Paleontology Laboratory
maintains a teaching collection of invertebrate, vertebrate and plant
fossils numbering more than 10,000 individual specimens. These
specimens are used in a several of courses including Invertebrate
Paleontology and Historical Geology. Many of these are featured on
the web based paleontology tutorial that accompanies the invertebrate
paleontology course.

In addition to the teaching collection, the Paleontology Lab is
home to more than 10,000 individual fossil specimens that are used
for research purposes. A large portion of this material are fossil
invertebrates, mostly marine bivalve molluscs, from the Triassic
Period. A significant proportion of the research collection comes
from the Alpine region of Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and
Italy), England, and from the western part of North and Central
America including Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, Utah,
Nevada, and Sonora Mexico. At any one time, additional fossil
material is on loan from other repositories such as the Smithsonian
Institution and the American Museum of Natural History.

Subcommission on Triassic Stratigraphy

The Cortland paleoserver is home to the Subcommission on Triassic
Stratigraphy (STS). Under the auspicities of the International Union of
Geological Sciences (IUGS) and International Stratigraphic Commission
(ISC), the STS is charged with the establishment of a standard,
globally applicable stratigraphic scale for the Triassic system.